This article aims to analyze national infectious disease surveillance systems of the three major Northeast Asian countries - China, Japan, and South Korea - in comparative perspective and investigate their regional cooperative efforts. Since national disease surveillance systems of individual countries are the foundation of global disease control and health governance, it is essential to investigate national disease surveillance systems and assess strengths and weaknesses of each system in comparative perspective. In spite of the importance of the topic and the increasing number of research on global health in International Relations, however, literature on national disease surveillance systems in IR is rare.
This article first discusses the importance of global health issues in the IR context and provides a framework for analysis incorporating four dimensions - local, national, regional, and global - into a single framework of global health governance. It then provides basic profiles of national disease surveillance systems such as an historical overview, number of staff, laws and regulations, and organizational structure, and examines institutional characteristics of each focusing on (1) how independent the national pivotal organization is from relevant government organizations; (2) how autonomous and capable local agencies are to cope with diseases. It finds that, overall, disease surveillance systems in the three countries are well developed in the sense that central control towers are effective in collecting and distributing information, making prompt decisions, and implementing them, while local agencies are effective in detecting, reporting, and controlling infection cases swiftly. However, Japan’s system is slightly more decentralized than the other two, and at the same time, the level of independence in Japan’s national key organization is slightly lower than the other two. This article also finds that various bilateral and multilateral attempts for regional cooperation have been made, especially led by China and Japan.